It was All a Marketing Stunt

The Italian ISP that deleted all of its servers… yeah, apparently… not so much.

Late last week, the owner of a small web hosting company in Italy said he “accidentally” executed some bad maintenance code on his servers, and they deleted all his servers.

Marco Marsala headed to a support forum and posted a cry for help claiming he made a big mistake,

“I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1,535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers,” Marsala wrote. “Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.

“All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).”

He got some sympathetic replies. However, most of the forum users basically told him he was an idiot and that since (as he further explained) that all of his onsite and offsite backup drives were also mounted to his servers at the time of execution, all of the sites that he ran (again, approximately 1535) all got permanently and irrevocably deleted.

Apparently, the delete was so destructive, that many users didn’t think that even an experienced data recovery company would be able to retrieve his data.

One user told him in no uncertain terms,

“You’re going out of business. You don’t need technical advice, you need to call your lawyer,”

I, and many others, woke up this morning only to find out that this had been nothing more than a giant hoax… it was all a marketing ploy. I guess the idea was that he was going to miraculously “restore” his data by himself, thus proving his technical superiority, and would hopefully gain more business.

If that wasn’t it, I have no idea, as, if I were someone wanting web hosting, I wouldn’t be looking to THAT guy…

According to Server Fault Meta, the whole thing was nothing more than a DUPLICATE of what is being called a “guerrilla marketing operation.” The user has been called a “blatant spammer/ troll” by a number of users

One user called Sirex, I think said it best, “we went into it thinking [this guy] was an idiot. We’ve came out of it thinking [this guy’s] an idiot, but for a different reason. I don’t think the joke is on us.

I happen to agree, here. If I were anyone that had a web account with this guy… I’d be long gone by now. What about you? Did you see this last week? Did you follow it at all? Were you surprised when it was reported to be a hoax? Why not chime in, in the Discussion Area, below and give me your thoughts?